


Pale Kings and Princes Too

by Muccamukk



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Canon Era, Dick Winters makes a lot of bad decisions, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s01e06 Bastogne, Exhaustion, Fae & Fairies, Fairy Tale Elements, M/M, Pining, Sieges, Winter, too many poetry quotes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 14:50:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16578593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: On the second night entrenched around Bastogne, Dick gets lost in the woods. The world he wanders into may offer more temptations than he is able to resist.





	Pale Kings and Princes Too

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this super creepy pic from [Picture Prompt Fun's Challenge #44](https://picture-prompt-fun.dreamwidth.org/66940.html). Also for h/c bingo square "Deals with Demons."
> 
> Poems quoted and referenced are: [The Stolen Child](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/stolen-child) by W. B. Yeats, [The Fairies](http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/fairies) by William Allingham, and [La Belle Dame sans Merci](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44475/la-belle-dame-sans-merci-a-ballad) by John Keats, which also provided the title.

_Where dips the rocky highland_  
_Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,_  
_There lies a leafy island_  
_Where flapping herons wake_  
_The drowsy water rats;_  
_There we’ve hid our faery vats,_  
_Full of berrys_  
_And of reddest stolen cherries._

On the second night entrenched around Bastogne, Dick got lost in the woods.

He'd been following the line west, up towards where Third Battalion was supposed to be dug in, moving one foot in front of the other through the snow and trying not to think of winters back home, when he realised that he'd gone for several minutes without finding the next foxhole. Dick turned, looking back along his tracks, wondering if he'd gotten behind the line or in front of it. He could have just found another gap. They'd been plugging them all day.

There should have been a slim first crescent moon rising, but the low cloud blocked any light same as it blocked any hope of air support. All Dick could see what white snow and dark tree trunks. He turned again, studying the forest. Trees stood all round him evenly spaced as though they'd been planted in a circle. Low, crocked trees, with dark leaves still clinging to them, not holly, but something similar that Dick didn't recognise.

He knew that he should follow his tracks backwards until he worked out where he'd lost the line. Certainly if he kept going forward, he risked walking into enemy lines the same as that German kid had walked into his own that morning. Dick had thought about taking that boy's overcoat. It had been heavy good quality wool, and much warmer than Dick's own. If he hadn't kept it himself, Dick could have given it to Nix. None of the men had decent winter gear. Dick had remembered Private Smith stabbing Tab that night in the rain, and thought better of it, but the strength of the temptation had struck him. Why shouldn't he have sent a boy into Divisions barely-sheltered prisoners' quarters without a coat when the Germans had hit the 101st medical division not ten hours before? One day on the line, and he was turning into the enemy

Now, Dick took a long breath through his nose, the frozen air tearing down his throat and making his chest hurt. Instead of smelling diesel exhaust, or tobacco or gun powder—a hint as to where his men were—he caught the scent of something so utterly out of place that for a moment his mind refused to register what it was.

Dick's soul, however, filled with the feeling that he was home, and safe, and he almost relaxed. Until his brain caught up and told him that he wasn't safe. He couldn't be safe here. Dick brought his rifle up and turned a third time, studying the trees around him, and trying to work out how the hell he was smelling that stream in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, on a sunny spring day.

The stream run near his grandfather's house, and Dick had fished there every summer of his boyhood, though he'd never managed to catch a fish. He'd liked the cool smell of the water, but most especially the burnt sugar of the cottonwood buds before they burst, and the way that one water plant with the broad hand-shaped leaves smelled sweet and musky when bruised. He'd lain on his back in the soft young plants and stared up at the sky between the new leaves, and dreamed all day.

That scent—wet new growth, burnt sugar and musk—he'd only smelt it on that bank as a child, nowhere else, not in all the places his army career had taken him. Dick drew in another deep breath through his nose, closing his eyes to focus on the smell. The air wasn't cold any more, and didn't hurt his chest. Instead it felt sweet and warm, and smelled overwhelmingly of his childhood.

Dick opened his eyes, and was home. He was standing on the bank of the stream in the green of spring, his rifle still in his hands, still dressed in his ODs and helmet. The late morning sun filtered through the green of the cottonwood trees, dappling the buckwheat honey of the stream water in ever-changing shadow.

Dick knew the exact place, a little up stream from his grandfather's house, where the willow roots made a small pond. He'd swum here a dozen times a summer, splashing in the cool water running off the Blue Ridge Mountains. He could hear it riffling over the willow roots down stream, and listened to the calls of mocking birds or finches, but didn't hear any.

It wasn't possible. He'd been in Belgium seconds before. Dick squeezed his eyes shut and took another long breath, expecting to smell the crispness of snow and nothing else but a cold, barren winter. He still smelled spring in Lebanon County.

Dick opened his eyes. He stood by the stream, no trees around him save the shading cottonwoods and the weeping willow. He crouched and splashed his hand through the edge of the water. It was cool but not cold, just the right temperature to sink into on a hot day in late April or early May. He lifted his finger to his nose and smelled clean water and a trace of decaying water plants, a smell his mother complained was impossible to wash out of his clothes.

He stood and turned again. He could see the rolling fields that led down to either side of the stream, and the path through them to the fence, which would have the way he'd come if he were nine years old, and not a soldier on another continent.

Dick felt anger growing in his gut and his jaw tensing until his teeth ground. He was one day into a siege, responsible for the lives of six hundred men, and he was going mad. Something about the situation—watching his men shiver and starve in the cold with no medical company, praying for supplies, for the Germans to change their minds, for a miracle of God—something in all that had snapped Dick's mind, irrevocably and with no warning. He must be standing in the words in the dark, with his helmet in his hand, staring into the distance. He hoped he would freeze to death before they found him like that. He knew that the shame of it would kill him.

"You're not going crazy," Nix said, which Dick wasn't willing to put in the good sign tally. He'd left Nix in the battalion CP, and Nix had said he'd been headed into Bastogne in a minute.

"I don't think a hallucination is qualified to speak to that," Dick said, but he turned towards the sound of the voice nonetheless.

Nix was standing under the willow tree, face half obscured by bright new leaves and trailing branches. He was wearing his ODs, but with his jacket stripped to his undershirt with his suspenders hanging at his hips. His shoulders glistened where a patch of sunlight penetrated the leaves, and Dick realised that Nix had just been swimming. "I'm not a hallucination," Nix said, and stepped forward and out from under the willow branches. He had a strawberry ice cream cone in his hand, dark chunks of real berries bright against the pink cream.

Dick swallowed, and looked from Nix's flushed, healthy, clean-shaven face to the ice cream and back again. "Well, you're not doing a heck of a lot to convince me this is real," he said.

Nix shrugged and licked the ice cream, pink tongue lapping at pink cream, exactly the way he had when he and Dick had gotten ice cream in Aldbourne that summer between Normandy and Holland. "Oh, it's real," Nix said, then he grinned and held out the ice cream. "Give it a try and see."

Dick felt his hair standing on end, and he kept his rifle ready, not aimed at the hallucination, but in a position where it could be at half a second's notice. "I don't think so," he said.

"What, you'd rather be nuts?" Nix asked. He stepped towards Dick, and Dick stepped back. The ground was soft under his jump boots, and he smelt the pungent order of crushed ferns as he moved. Lord, it smelled so real. He could feel the sun on his cheeks and the humid air warming his lungs.

"No. I'd rather be back in with my men," Dick said, not taking his eyes off of Nix. "I need to be back with my men."

Nix smiled and spread his hands. The motion dripped ice cream down the cone over his fingers, sending a pale pink streak down his bare wrist and forearm. He glanced sideways at it and then licked backwards up his arm, up his wrist, over his fingers, and to the ice cream cone, looking at Dick through his eyelashes as he did. Then he licked his lips.

Dick felt heat rise in his cheeks, the way he always did when he watched Nix flirt, and told himself—like he always did—that it was embarrassment not desire.

"If it helps," Nix said, "this place is real, and I'm not a hallucination, but we're not in Pennsylvania, and I'm not Captain Lewis Nixon of the 101st Airborne Division."

"Am I dead?" Dick asked. He couldn't be, could he? But he supposed a quick bullet to the skull could have done it before he realised what was happening. He didn't know if a soldier who'd killed at least half a dozen men would go to heaven, but this didn't exactly seem like hell either.

"No," Nix said. "You're not dead, and I'm not an angel, before you ask."

He said it so much like Nix would have, the mocking, sardonic edge curling his mouth up, the laughter in his eyes mixing with fondness. "Never dreamed you were," Dick said as he would to Nix, almost out of reflex. He wondered if freezing to death in a clearing in the woods hallucinating and talking to himself. "Who are you?" he asked again.

"It's easier to show you," Nix said, and then, just for the time it took to blink, he wasn't Nix at all. The creature in Nix's place stood tall and pale as bone china, slender as a blade but clean-limbed and strong. His dark eyes sat too wide and too large on his high-cheeked face, while his pouting lips were the colour of fresh the strawberries. Dick though he saw a silver crown and the glimpse of jewels at his throat, but then the man was just Nix again, or Nix as he had been when Dick had met him over two years ago, fresh-faced and beautiful.

Dick took a sharp breath and another step back, his rifle coming up to level at the thing's heart. "What are you?" he asked, though really, he had clearly gone mad, or was dead, so what was the point in trying to reason out of it? "Are you a demon?"

The thing that wasn't Nix shrugged the same way as Nix would have when he was pretending to be casual about something close to his heart. Dick was having trouble keeping his M1 levelled on him. "I've been called that. A demon, a fairy, a devil, a fair prince, a dark elf, a weirdling. You can call me 'Lewis,' if you like."

"A fairy?" Dick asked, unable to help himself. "Like in _Peter Pan_?"

Lewis sighed and rolled his eyes. "More like a _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ , if you have to use mortal references." He took another long lick of his ice cream—digging out a strawberry with his tongue and holding it between white teeth for a moment before sucking it down—and held the cone out again. "Sure you don't want any? It won't last."

Dick shook his head. He'd backed up enough that his shoulders bumped against the the rough bark of the cottonwood he'd always used to lean against as he pretended to fish. "I want to go back to my men," he said loudly and clearly.

"Have it your way," Lewis told him. He was pouting, the same way Nix was when Dick wouldn't play along with his latest whim. He waved his empty hand languidly. The cottonwood buds all burst once, filling the sky with a whirlwind of silky buds. They swirled down and around Dick, darkening the sky, and then the world vanished.

The cold hit Dick hard enough to knock him on his ass, and he fell back into the snow with a gasp. One second he'd been by the creek, his back to the old cottonwood tree, the sun high in the morning, the next he was alone in the cold and dark. His rifle was in his hands still, and Dick clutched it, gloved fingers tightening on the butt.

He saw blackness, only blackness all around him, and his lungs burned from the cold. Maybe this was hell. Had Dick failed some test? He felt fear clench in his chest, before the snow and the dark slashes of trees started to come back into focus around him as his eyes readjusted to the night.

Dick was sitting in the snow in the glade, surrounded by the dark twisted trunks of trees, his own tracks a gash leading away to the east. He looked at his watch, and the radium dials read a few minutes past midnight. Twenty minutes since he'd left the two boys in the last of F Company's foxholes. It seemed as though more time had passed, and Dick tried not to think of Rip Van Winkle. It had just been a waking dream, something brought on by stress and fatigue. 

"For Pete's sake," Dick muttered to himself for sure this time. He pushed himself to his feet and followed his footsteps back towards Second Battalion.

_Come away, O human child!_  
_To the waters and the wild_  
_With a faery, hand in hand,_  
_For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand._

Later, Dick asked, "Do you think I'm cracking up?"

Nix tapped the ash off his last cigarette and tried to stare at Dick through the dark, but the orange glow lit only his own face. "No more than usual, I guess," he said, voice cautious. "You always were a crazy son of a bitch. Why do you ask?"

They were sitting shoulder to shoulder in Dick's foxhole, trying not to listen to the kid from Dog Company coughing his lungs out not a hundred yards away. Dick didn't know how to answer Nix's question without either lying or telling him about the strange waking dream he'd had in the woods. "Just tired," he said, "never mind."

"Jesus," Nix said, and didn't explain what he meant for a moment as he focused on getting the last few puffs out of the butt of his smoke. "You can't crack up, Dick."

Dick sighed and rested his head on Nix's shoulder. He didn't have a winter hat, but had wrapped a scarf around his head to try to stay warm. Most of the men didn't have that much to wear under their heat-leeching steel helmets. Each company had lost a half dozen men to frost bite, and that wasn't looking at the casualties from first Battalion's mauling at Foy. The kid from D Company kept coughing, and Dick knew it wasn't his fault, but wanted him to shut up before the German's heard him and lobbed a shell into his foxhole.

"Seriously," Nix said, voice suddenly intense. "You cannot lose it."

"All right, all right," Dick said tiredly. He could sleep here, against Nix's shoulder maybe, even if he was expecting the next shell at any moment. He didn't think he'd slept more than five minutes in two nights.

Nix's shoulder rose and fell under Dick's ear, and Dick felt more than heard Nix's breath hitch. "Listen to me, Dick," he said. "I can't do this if you're not here. I can't."

That didn't make sense, Dick thought groggily. "Course you can, Lew," he said. "You just go back to town. Keep telling you you don't have to stay out on the line."

"You don't..." Nix started to say, but he couldn't finish. He stubbed the final sad fragment of the cigarette out before saying, "Doesn't matter if I'm on the line on not. Or it won't in the end."

"No, I guess not," Dick said. If the 506th fell, the town proper wouldn't be far behind. "I had the strangest dream. Do you believe in elves?"

"What like the ones that make the shoes?" Nix asked. He leaned his head over to rest his cheek on Dick's scarf. It was almost nice, except now Dick could feel that Nix was shivering so hard his teeth chattered, and even their closeness under the tarp couldn't warm either of them. Nothing Dick could do could make any of his men safe, and even his own body couldn't be spent to warm the man he secretly loved.

"No, like Oberon and Titania," Dick said, but he fell asleep before he could tell Nix about the dream.

_Where the wave of moonlight glosses_  
_The dim gray sands with light,_  
_Far off by furthest Rosses_  
_We foot it all the night,_  
_Weaving olden dances_  
_Mingling hands and mingling glances_  
_Till the moon has taken flight;_  
_To and fro we leap_  
_And chase the frothy bubbles,_  
_While the world is full of troubles_  
_And anxious in its sleep._

The next night, Dick walked the line as the sun was setting, casting the forest in darkening shades of grey until the sky and the snow were a uniform charcoal black, the horizon no more discernable than it was flyable. Dick found his way by feel more than sight, listening for the soft voices of the men and smelling the cigarettes of the few who still had smokes left. They were scared and restless. Easy had lost a replacement to the Germans and a lieutenant to trench foot, and the other two companies had caught worse. The kid from Dog had stopped coughing some time in the night, and Dick didn't know if he'd gotten better or died.

Word from Regiment was that Saint-Vith had fallen, and that no one knew what had happened to the 106th Infantry Division. A rumour had spread like flame on gun cotton that the Germans had slaughtered them all, even those who'd tried to surrender, but Dick hadn't heard that confirmed. He did know that the road north was cut, and the 101st could neither help the troops there nor receive relief.

He paused for a moment to talk to boys in the last of F Company's foxhole—a private too young to shave and a corporal Dick recognised from Toccoa, both tired and frightened--and started out west again to see if he could find Third Battalion's line, or if there was a gap again. He never had found them the evening before, though Nix said he'd been able to later that same night.

The snow was thick in front of Dick, seemingly untouched by troopers going back and forth between battalions. Dick stepped high, trying to make clean tracks rather than dragging his feet through the snow. His legs burned from the effort, and he could feel perspiration building under his jacket and made himself slow down. He knew that was dangerous—his uncles had always told him that on hunting trips: don't sweat in the cold, you can freeze your skin right off.

Too many of Dick's men were freezing already. He should have prepared them better, made sure they brought more supplies, even though he didn't know where he would have gotten them. Between the 101st and the 82nd, they'd stripped Mourmelon-le-Grand to the bones on the way out. Now, the 101st didn't even have enough food to last more than a day, and now one had heard from the 82nd.

Dick was lost again, he realised. He could see a trench in the snow that could have been the tracks of another man, or even his own from the night before, but no signs of the men. When Dick looked up, he realised he'd wandered back into the glade, and started to turn back. His hairs stood on end just from the sight of the ring of gnarled trees, each seeming to cast a shadow all around it.

As he turned, he smelled it again, the creek in Lebanon County, the sun on the fields, the cottonwood trees.

This time, Dick didn't close his eyes, but it didn't matter. One moment he was knee-deep in snow, the next he was standing on the bank of the stream.

"I knew you'd come back," Lewis said.

Dick turned towards his voice, leaving his rifle shouldered this time. Lewis lay amongst the purple and yellow creeping flowers that grew along the banks, his hands folded behind his head. His legs bruised the hand-shaped leaves, and the air filled with their scent. Their leaves were fading, like they did in the early summer, and Dick recognised the flowers as ones that started in June, though he'd never learned their names.

If Dick ever got home, he was going to learn the name of every wildflower in Pennsylvania.

"I guess I did," Dick said. "I'm still not sure I'm not cracking up."

"Well, sit here a minute while you decide," Lewis said, patting the ground beside him.

Not knowing what else to do, Dick sat. The heat of the summer sun burned through his wool coat, rising steam as the snow melted off of it. Dick felt itchy and too hot. He took his helmet off and pushed his scarf off his head, scrubbing his hand through his hair. It felt sticky and stiff with days of grime and sweat.

"You could go for a swim," Lewis said. "The water's warm this time of year."

"It was spring before," Dick answered, though he really didn't know why he was talking to his own deluded imaginings.

"Yes," Lewis agreed. "It was. Time's not really the same, here, is it?"

"I wouldn't know." Dick looked down at Lewis, who was so much like his own Nix, the real Nix, but without the years of heartache and war. He still had that roll of puppy fat around his waist, which Dick hadn't seen since Holland, and his skin was smooth and unblemished by chilblains. The way his arms wear raised above his head made the shape of his chest and stomach stand out in strong smooth lines, just like the ones that Dick had always wanted to run his hands down. He'd never gotten over having Nix so close these last few years, but never quite close enough. The casual touches, the nearness of a buddy should be enough, Dick had always told himself it was enough, but he still had always wanted more.

"You could stay here," Lewis told him. He rolled on his side and propped his head up on one arm so that he could look up at Dick from a pin up pose, one hand suggestively draped over his hip. "When was the last time you actually slept?"

Dick shook his head. It had taken them almost a day to get organised and deployed from Mourmelon, and almost another to get to Bastogne, and he hadn't really slept since then. Three days? Four? He didn't remember. He didn't remember what sleep felt like, but he knew that soon the pull of the of his eyelids and his head towards the ground would overtake him, and he wouldn't be able to respond any more.

"Lie here, with me," Lewis said, and he didn't sound like Nix any more. His voice was deeper, and had a doubled sound to it, like two voices singing a perfect octave apart. "I'll tell you a story."

"Tell me," Dick said, but he didn't lie down. He pulled his knees up in front of him and wrapped his arms around them. The water of the creek swirled and bubbled below him, picking up speed as it left the pond and riffled over the willow roots. He should get up, demand to go back to his men like he had before. They needed him to be there for them. Nix had been right. After Colonel Sink, Dick was the last man in the Regiment who could afford to crack up. Too many people looked to Dick and expected to see strength and forthrightness. Some day, after the war had ended, Dick could allow himself the indulgence of being a weak man, but not now.

Still, he needed rest, and perhaps a story couldn't hurt.

Lewis reached over and closed his fingers around Dick's calf, where his pants bloused, just above the top of his right boot. His fingers were warm even through the stiff, mud-encrusted cotton. It was the first time they'd touched, and Dick shivered at how real he felt.

"Once upon a time there was a looking glass world," Lewis said, his voice low and doubled—Nix's voice with another singing underneath it. "In that time, children and boys on the verge of becoming men—brazen youths without blemish—could visit. They travelled through circles, and through ponds, and in their dreams. They would stay for seven nights and seven days, or seven years, or their whole lives, and return with shards of the looking glass in their eyes, and in their hearts."

"'They stole little Bridget For seven years long; When she came down again Her friends were all gone. They took her lightly back, Between the night and morrow, They thought that she was fast asleep, But she was dead with sorrow.'" Dick's little sister had been obsessed with that poem around the time Dick had enlisted, and had recited it with enough fervour and repetition that Dick had involuntarily memorised it as well. It fell from his lips now, and he thought of a little girl spending seven years dancing, and returning to her world no different than she'd left it, only to find everyone she'd loved irrevocably changed, to find the world had changed and she had been left behind.

"Yes," Lewis said, and the word sounded sibilant and hissing. "Yes. For seven years long."

"That's a high price," Dick said.

"For seven years free of care?" Lewis asked. "For seven years of life, and health, and joy?"

There was a catch to that, but Dick didn't remember what it was. It wasn't as though Edith Winters had been the sort of mother to read much other than Bible stories to her children, and aside from scraps of poetry, Dick didn't remember really hearing much else about this kind of bargain. Or perhaps the Bible covered it just as well, had not Christ been tempted by the devil with power and peace and good things to eat? "What about her soul?" Dick asked, thinking again of little Bridget.

"Oh, souls," Lewis said dismissively. "Men worry about souls; they're not our concern. We don't hoard them or steal them or whatever your poets say."

Dick shifted his rifle so that he could lie back, and looked up at the deep blue sky through the cottonwoods. They were dark green and in full leaf now, and the air smelled of ripening hay and warm water. How many summer afternoons had he slept away under this tree? How many dreams had he dreamed, lulled by the hum of bees and the distant rumble of tractors, mourning doves and cuckoos calling from the grove downstream?

"And no birds sing," Dick said to himself, remembering a fragment of another poem, one about a beautiful and heartless elfin lady seducing a knight. There really weren't any birds though. He'd seen nothing living save Lewis since been here. This was a barren simulacrum of his home state.

Lewis, his _belle dame sans merci_ , laughed at that. "Oh, that old song," he said. "Did you ever wonder what would have happened if the knight had stayed?"

"I can't stay," Dick said. "I need to go back to my men."

He sat up again, then pushed himself up against the tree trunk, his legs aching with the effort. Every part of his body longed for the downward pull of sleep. If he could only rest, even for a few minutes, he could go back to his men stronger and renewed, able to be the paragon they needed to follow. They would look at him and see a leader who was calm and rested and sure. The battalion deserved better than an under-slept red-eyed wreck shivering in his CP, holding onto his sanity by his fingernails. Probably, they deserved one who wasn't standing in the middle of the woods hallucinating about elves.

"Put me back with my men," Dick told Lewis, straightening at last. He closed his eyes, blocking out the stream, and took one last long breath of hot summer air.

"I didn't finish my story," Lewis said. He was standing next to Dick now, though he hadn't gotten up, merely appeared in a new place.

Dick shook his head. "I want to go back."

"Fine," Lewis said. "Next time."

The sun flared too hot and too bright. In an eye blink that Dick didn't blink, he was standing in the snow again, the freezing fog burning his cheeks and taking his breath away. Dick wrapped his scarf around his hair again and settled his helmet on top of it.

Dick turned to retrace his tracks back towards Fox Company. He wouldn't come back this way again, not if he could help it. None of them could afford fantasy or distractions, the battalion's XO and functional commander least of all.

_Come away, O human child!_  
_To the waters and the wild_  
_With a faery, hand in hand,_  
_For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand._

"What do you think happened to the 106th?" Nix asked. His hands were wrapped around a tin of coffee that hadn't been warm for more than thirty seconds after it came off the burner. Dick thought Nix could have scrounged a hat, but he hadn't, and Dick didn't know if that was because Nix was trying to prove some kind of point, or if he hadn't thought of needing one.

Nix spent so much time either holding the battalions together or playing messenger between them and Regiment that Dick didn't know when Nix spent a minute to look after himself and eat. Or wouldn't know if Dick hadn't made him join Second Battalion's chow line when he could, what there was of it. None of that—not making Nix sit for a minute, or catching a few minutes of sleep next to each other, nor trying to make him eat—seemed to keep the dark hollows from forming under Nix's eyes, or keep his hands from shaking now.

Dick couldn't look at Nix and not think of Lewis, or rather think of Nix as Dick had met him at Fort Benning, the curve of his hips then, and the puppy softness still in his face. He'd been an arrogant son of a bitch back then—they both had been—so confident he could take on the entire U.S. Army on whatever terms they chose. They'd looked at each other and seen smiling heroes, rising into glory at each others sides, like Ajax and Achilles, without remembering how that story ended.

"Dick?" Nix's voice was sharper now, worried.

"Sorry," Dick said. "What were you asking, Lew?"

"What do you think happened at Saint-Vith, to the 106th?"

Dick shook his head. "Green troops like that?" There was only one thing that could have happened. "The 82nd was too late to help them." For that matter, they didn't know what had happened to the 82nd, either.

"Sounded like they had more gaps than line," Nix said, and they both paused then, thinking of that first day and how the Germans could easily have swept through their lines if they'd put their minds to it. They still could. "Guess we're officially surrounded now, huh? Like the Alamo. That looked like a lot more fun in the movies."

"Nix, if you start singing 'The Yellow Rose of Texas,' you're sleeping somewhere else," Dick said, remembering the movie where Davy Crockett had belted that out while Santa Ana's men gunned him down. Dick was angling for a smile out of Nix, but the one he got was so thin and strained that he wished he hadn't bothered.

"Do you think they really killed them all?" Nix asked, and Dick almost thought he meant at the Alamo and was trying to remember if Santa Ana had taken prisoners. He'd been thinking of Thermopylae, too, and the epitaph atop the burial mound: "Go tell the Spartans, you who read: We took their orders, and lie here dead."

"The 106st?" Dick shook his head. "I don't know."

"Do you think they'll kill us?"

Dick looked up sharply and Nix looked away, just for a second, then met Dick's eyes again and refused to retract the question. "You can't talk like that, Lew," Dick said. "What if the men heard?"

Nix shook his head slightly, dismissing the men, and morale and everything that was actually going to keep them alive without enough food, clothes or ammunition. "Answer the question."

"I don't know," Dick said again. He couldn't think about that. "I don't plan to find out."

"I don't think the 106th did either," Nix said. He lifted his hip flask in toast and tipped the last swallow out of it. "Here to those poor bastards, and here's to the last whiskey in Bastogne."

Nix was scared, Dick realised and felt his stomach twist. Nix was so deeply afraid that he couldn't even keep up a front for Dick. And he was the operations officer for the whole 506th PIR, so if any man knew the situation better, Dick didn't know who it could be. If Nix was scared, they all should be. They'd gone almost three days without relief, and had no word of it, or sign of the weather breaking to allow resupply.

Dick knew that every man in the battalion would fight to his last bullet, then fight with boot knives and bare hands, for the buddy in the foxhole with him, if not for some Belgian town no one had heard of a week ago. What Dick didn't know was if that would make the least difference in the end. They could go down together singing "The Yellow Rose of Texas," or they could each one go down desperately, brutally and alone, but if the Germans pressed their advance now, the 101st would fall. Their only hope at all was that the American forces had more nerve and more luck on their side.

Nix had known that for days, Dick thought now. He'd always been quick to see the angles and put all the pieces together. It probably hadn't taken more than glancing at the map to tell Nix that the 101st was being spent like the Spartans at Thermopylae, and that only a miracle granted by a God that he didn't believe in would save them. Nix had known that for days, and now he was afraid, and he didn't want to die.

For once, Dick didn't know what comfort he could offer. He'd always been very good at saying the right thing to buck up a flagging trooper or a nervous junior officer. He could look them in the eye and tell them to hold on just a little longer, or make a joke, or say that he believed in them. Mostly men just wanted to know that someone else cared. Maybe that would be enough here. It seemed like the only thing Nix would believe.

Reaching across the ruins of the CP, Dick closed his hand around Nix's wrist, looked him in the eyes, and said, "Lew, whatever happens, we're in it together, huh?"

"Yeah, I know that," Nix said, but he wouldn't look at Dick. "I'd be less afraid if you weren't here. You're the one I worry about."

_Where the wandering water gushes_  
_From the hills above Glen-Car,_  
_In pools among the rushes_  
_That scarce could bathe a star,_  
_We seek for slumbering trout_  
_And whispering in their ears_  
_Give them unquiet dreams;_  
_Leaning softly out_  
_From ferns that drop their tears_  
_Over the young streams._

The next day, the commander of the German forces told Division that more armour was on the way, and that the only thing that would save the 101st and the civilians in the town from "total annihilation" would be their immediate surrender. The sum total of Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe response was the word, "Nuts!"

Dick didn't think he'd seen the men love a division commander more than they had when they heard that, not since Bill Lee, in any case. Dick himself waited in sick silence for the German deadline to pass, fully expecting to look that annihilation in the teeth. Nix stood with him, tense and silent. When the allotted hours came and went, and the skies didn't open up and pour down artillery, and no Panzers mowed through the trees, Nix grumbled and spat and said he had to go back to town, and Dick said he would walk to Third Battalion and check in with the men along the way.

It was the first time that Dick had sought out the glade, and he wondered now if he wouldn't find it. It seemed like the logic of poems dictated that he would not. If there were justice—or at least literary irony—in the world, the decision Dick had made would inherently prevent him from acting it out. Yet when Dick set off from the last of Fox Companies foxholes, he easily found his tracks from the night before and followed them.

About an hour after sunset, Dick came to the circle of trees, a circle which now had a single set of tracks leading to the centre, and a patched of snow trodden flat therein. Before Dick entered, this time he paused and listened, making sure that the promised German assault had not merely come late. If it had, he would go back to his men and die with them, and forget about this whole, ludicrous idea.

The forest remained utterly silent. Dick didn't even hear the distant singing that Compton had been trying to shut down when he'd passed through Easy's lines. "And no bird sings," he muttered to himself as he walked forward. If this didn't count as a cold hill side, Dick didn't know what would.

When Dick came to the centre of the ring of trees, he shouldered his rifle and turned around three times counter clockwise as he had unwittingly done that first night, closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath of frigid air through his nose.

Dick felt the sun on his face and kept his eyes closed, letting it sooth him while he breathed in the warm air and let the heat soak to his bones. He could smell the haying now, and the crisp edge of decay that meant the poplar leaves would be starting to turn. Were this actually the Lebanon County of Dick's childhood, he would be back in school by now, and only allowed to the creek on the rare sunny weekend of an Indian Summer.

When Dick opened his eyes, he saw the sombre greens and gentle yellows and browns of the stream bank in late summer. The rest of the stream was running low, but the pond upstream of the willow roots was still waist deep. The surface of the water rippled around Lewis as he swam in the sun-warmed pool, doing little to hide his nakedness.

"You came back," Lewis said, grinning up at Dick.

"Yeah."

Lewis flopped on his back and then twisted and dove like an otter, giving Dick a spectacular view of his ass. Dick assumed it was on purpose, but couldn't bring himself to look away, not when this version of Nix was so full-fleshed and beautiful. Nix had lost weight in Holland, and not managed to gain it back in Mourmelon. He would never be gaunt—not unless he ended up in one of those German P.O.W. camps—but he'd lost the softness around his waist and hips that he'd had when Dick had met him. There was a curve to his stomach that Dick had always wanted to touch and rest his cheek against, even though he knew he never would have then for a dozen different reasons, and now he never could. The Nix he'd fallen in love with had changed in the mortal world, but was unchangeable here.

He watched the creek water flow off Lewis's body as he stood. It clung in droplets to his chest hair only to build until it trickled down over his muscles and back into the pond. His fair skin gleamed, turning honey coloured in the late-afternoon sun, and his black hair stuck to his face and fell into his eyes until he raked it back with his fingers. Dick felt warmth start to pool in his belly and sat down on the bank so that he could pull his knees up in front of him.

"I wanted to hear the rest of the story," Dick said.

"Did you really?" Lewis asked, and raised an eyebrow. He stepped forward out of the deepest part of the pool so that the water only came up to his thighs. His cock hung slack between his legs, surrounded by more dark hair. Dick had seen Nix naked hundreds of times, but he couldn't stop staring now. Perhaps, he thought, it was the potential of it. Nix naked before was just Nix naked, no matter how attractive Dick found him. Lewis was something Dick could have, if Dick wanted him. "Why don't you come on in and hear it from down here?" Lewis asked. "The water's lovely."

"Maybe. If I like what I hear," Dick said. He took his helmet off again, and set it on the dried grass beside him so that he could ruffle his hair and let the sun dry it. It would feel so good to be clean again. Four days of living in foxholes, and all the men stank. Dick knew exactly what that stream water would feel like on his skin, and how this time of year it would be warm enough to splash around in for hours. 

Lewis stayed where he was, thigh deep in water and watching Dick candidly. "Once upon a time," he started again, "When men were simpler creatures, and their devices limited to toys for the nobles and palaces to their gods, we walked between worlds, we to yours, you to ours. We would find young men, princes if we could get them, and bring them here to be our princes, our consorts, our talismans."

"You would feed on them?" Dick asked.

"Of course not," Lewis snapped, then paused and shrugged. "Well, yes, we would, but not on the princes. You can feed on any mortal at a cusp, you don't need to go to the trouble of pulling one between worlds. A prince or a baby, they're like the water flowing through a mill race, the energy in their ability to change—truly change, not just cast an illusion—that can power a kingdom."

Dick thought about that. It didn't really make sense to him, but then he was a Christian man who believed in miracles not magic, or had believed that before three nights ago. He was going to have to figure out the rules to this place and fast if he wanted to go forward with his plan. "You said that that was before," Dick said. "What about now?"

"Murmured tales of iron wars," Lewis answered, quoting Shakespeare of all things. "That last great war, it sent us into hiding, and my lord and lady have not come out since. They are too cautious, too frightened of iron. We've grown tired of waiting."

"The Great War?" Dick asked, also wondering who _we_ involved. "How old are you?"

"What?" Lewis frowned. "Do you call it that now? The one with the warrior emperor who kept escaping from islands. We liked him."

"Napoleon?" Dick asked, and Lewis nodded. Dick tightened his arms around his knees and tried not to let how much that rocked him back show on his face. "If a prince stayed for more than seven years, would he live forever?"

Lewis shrugged. "He might. It's been so long, I hardly remember."

Dick filed that one under _no_ , as Lewis would surely have noticed immortal human princes, or perhaps they turned into fairies after a while. Dick began to unlace his right boot, meaning to put his feet in the pond. "And they can leave if they choose," he asked.

"After seven long years," Lewis agreed. He stepped forward and reached out his hand towards Dick, drops of water falling from his fingers to plink onto the surface of the pond. "Will you come with me?" he asked.

"Are you sure you want me?" Dick asked. He got the right boot off, rolled his trousers up to his knee, and started on the left boot.

"Of course," Lewis said. "Why do you think you were able to find your way here?"

"You said you wanted a boy on the cusp of becoming a man," Dick said. He pulled his left boot off and slowly began to roll up his other pant leg. "A youth without blemish." Lewis had been watching the slow revelation of Dick's bare skin. When Dick uncovered the scar of the ricochet from Carentan—still raised and pink six months later—Lewis gasped and flinched away. "I've been wounded in battle. I've killed seven men and ordered my own troopers to their deaths," Dick told him, not looking away as Lewis backed slowly into the water and shed his shape. "I think that whatever change war could make to my soul has already happened."

Lewis hissed at Dick through sharpened teeth. His face had thinned into the high-cheeked porcelain mask Dick had seen only in flashes before. Lewis's body was still beautiful, but beautiful in the way a print by Toulouse-Lautrec or an impressionist painting of a dancer drawn in a few strokes—all slender grace with no connection to solid flesh—and the look in his dark eyes made Dick shiver. "Why did you come back?" the creature that Dick could call nothing other than Lewis demanded.

"I wanted to know the terms." Dick drew a long breath before he said, "I know a prince who would meet you description: a son of privilege who lives with common soldiers, a warrior who has never killed and never been wounded. Is that something that would interest you?"

"He would come?" Around them, the leaves had begun to turn red and shiver on their branches as a wind whipped over the surface of the water. The sun dropped behind the horizon, and the world slid into twilight.

"He would if I brought him," Dick said. He rolled down his trousers and jammed his feet back into his boots, anticipating being dumped on his ass in the snow at any moment. "And I will bring him if you promise to keep him safe."

"For seven years long," Lewis promised, and then he did indeed dump Dick back in the snow. "Hurry." The word echoed around him, and for a moment Dick saw the shadow of Lewis looming above him, glowing eyed and eerie in the the dark.

Dick stood and looked about himself for his helmet. He'd set it on the grass beside him a few moments before, but it was gone now. "Damn," he muttered. Well, he had bigger worries. He pushed himself up, and cut across behind the lines towards his CP, avoiding the men's foxholes by looping behind them.

A quarter of an hour there, a few minutes to find Nix, and then the same back, After that, whatever happened to Dick, or the whole damned 101st Airborne Division, Nix would be safe and warm. Nix would be out of the war, and if that meant that Dick would have to figure out how to go forward without him, so be it.

_Come away, O human child!_  
_To the waters and the wild_  
_With a faery, hand in hand,_  
_For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand._

Lew was waiting in the battalion CP. He must have begged a smoke off of someone at Regiment, because he was cradling the last butt of a cigarette in gloved hands. His skin where it showed above his scarf and below his helmet was grey and wind chapped even through his growing beard. Dick wanted to pull his own gloves off so that he could cup Nix's cheeks between his palms and try to warm them.

His heart clenched at the sight of Nix the way it never had for Lewis. Who would Lewis appear as to Nix? Dick wondered. Would it be Kathy? Or some lost love Nix hadn't mentioned? Dick didn't think it would be him.

"What happened to your helmet?" Nix asked, and Dick blinked and shook his head. What did that matter now?

"Come on," Dick said, reaching out his hand for Nix's, though surely he couldn't lead him like a child into fairyland, or perhaps he could. They would go the back way, and the men wouldn't see. No one would see Dick lead Nix to his apparent death.

He would come back in seven years, Dick promised himself. Somehow, he would survive and come back and find Lew, win him free if he had to.

Nix wasn't moving, wasn't taking Dick's hand. "What's going on?" he asked. He was watching Dick through narrowed eyes, and suddenly Dick realised how he must look, coming back to the CP all alone without his helmet, wide-eyed and urgent.

"Want to show you something," Dick said, making himself slow down and take a breath.

"Is is it either a bottle of scotch or Jane Wyman?" Nix asked, immovable.

 _It could be Jane Wyman_ Dick almost said, but that wouldn't make Nix take him any more seriously. "Have I ever led you wrong, Lew?" he tried instead.

Nix snorted. "I'm here, aren't I?"

Dick took a sharp breath, but let that fall to one side, no matter how much guilt he felt that Nix had followed Dick all the way across the war to their almost certain end. Dick reminded himself that he'd gotten Nix into this, and now he'd get him out.

He must not have done much of a job keeping the guilt off his face because Nix's expression softened, and he reached out an took Dick's hand. "Not that I'd give this up for the world. You need someone to keep you out of trouble, don't you?"

"How about you keep me out of trouble over this way?" Dick said, and tugged at Nix's arm. But his resolve was already faltering. Nix had followed Dick and served first the company, then the battalion and now the regiment for as long as Dick had. What right did Dick have to bargain away Nix's service? How could Dick justify sacrificing an officer they all relied on?

How could Dick stand by, and wait and see what would get his best friend first: cold, starvation or slaughter?

"For Christ's sake, Dick." Nix wasn't moving. He jerked his hand out of Dick's hold and stepped back into the CP. "Sit down for a minute, will you?"

"I..." Dick started, but Nix was already thumping down onto a crate inside the CP and poking at a burner with some thrice-boiled coffee grounds on it. "All right."

When Dick sat down a few feet away from Nix, Nix shifted his crate closer, having to rock it hard to unstick it where it'd frozen to the ground. Nix pulled off his helmet and set it on Dick's head, the warmth of the metal lingering. "There you go"—he tapped the white spade on the side with two fingers—"Even the right regiment. Good thing they haven't got around to promoting me to general yet."

"The generals are all in town," Dick said. It wasn't like they were safe there, not with the Germans intermittently shelling Bastogne as well, but it wasn't on the line.

"Why do you think I'm out here?" Nix asked and forced a grin. Dick couldn't find it in him to smile back, even though he knew that Nix was trying to cheer Dick up from what must look like the edges of battle fatigue. "That and your charming company." Another smile followed that, this one crinkling Nix's eyes.

Before it was even shell shock, they'd used to call it 'soldier's heart.' Dick could see why. He felt like his own heart was hollow, only still beating out of habit. The moments of elation that he'd found a way out, at least for the one of them who mattered most, were fading fast. Nix wouldn't go with Dick, and Dick was too tired to figure out how to make him.

"I wish..." Dick started to say, but he didn't know how to end that thought either. All he could think was that he had to find a way to get Nix safe, because he would never act with the least inclination to save himself. Dick looked around, but none of the men were in sight. He leaned in close to Nix and said in a low voice, "I'd be a lot less scared if I knew you were safe."

"Me?" Nix said, jesting, but then he paused and scratched his hands through his hair which stood on end even more. "You're serious, aren't you?"

"Yeah," Dick said. He kept his head low and didn't look at Nix. "If I could get you out of here, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I wouldn't even ask you."

"I'd just come right back like a bad penny," Nix told him. He nudged his shoulder against Dick's, but Dick didn't push back, just let himself be jostled. "You know that, right?"

Dick nodded. "I wish I knew why," he said. The way Nix stuck to him couldn't simply be duty, not for a man like Nix, and it seemed extreme even for personal loyalty, but then war did strange things to a fellow's head. It was making Dick consider betraying his best friend, and it was apparently bringing the fairies back to the world, or perhaps it was driving them away. It was certainly driving Dick quite mad.

"You know why," Nix said. When Dick didn't answer, Nix leaned forward until he'd put himself in Dick's line of sight, and put his hand high on Dick's thigh so that the tips of his fingers curled inside Dick's leg. "Don't you?" he asked.

"No," Dick said, not sure if he was answering Nix's question or denying his touch. Either way, Nix pulled his hand away, and Dick wished he hadn't. He understood what Nix's words and touch had meant, but he couldn't contemplate it, not when he was so close to breaking and sending Nix away for seven years long, not when he was still considering how to do it.

"I know," Nix said, voice low and self-scathing. He didn't lean away, and with his head dropped, Dick's helmet almost touched Lew's hair. "And I know your boat don't float that way, hell mine doesn't a lot of the time, guess you're an exception, but you wanted to know why I won't leave, that's the answer."

Dick closed his eyes and let his whole body slump forward. Nix's sideways admission should have been everything he ever wanted, but in truth it defeated him. His mind kept telling him it was too late, too late, too late over and over again, and he wanted to go back to Lewis, who at least Dick was sure was tempting him with a false heart. It was easier to look the object of his desire in the eye in that other dream world. Here, Dick was too much of a coward.

He heard Nix lean away, and knew he'd get up in a minute, and Dick would lose his last hope of either replying to Nix's confession or of getting him to go with him to the fairy ring. He finally knew the right words to do it, too. Dick could promise Nix a version of himself that could be whatever Nix wanted him to be. He could promise Nix scotch and Jane Wyman and a Dick Winters who could love him openly, even if it was in a strange world.

All it would take would be for Dick to stand with Nix and lead him by the hand behind the lines, across towards Third Battalion's positions, and then to follow his tracks into the centre of the ring of dark trees. It would be easy. Lewis would take Nix, and Dick would know he was safe, and that whatever happened, Dick didn't have to risk getting his heart broken.

"I really am yellow," Dick said softly, but not too quietly for Nix to hear. Nix didn't answer, still likely reeling from Dick's implied rebuff. "Nix," Dick said, and Nix stopped in an awkward half crouch in front of him.

"Yeah?"

"When we get out of this, we're going to have to talk about what you just said."

"If we get out of this," Nix emphasised the conditional, "am I going to like what I hear?"

"When, Lew," Dick said. He stood and took both of Nix's hands in his. "It's when. I promise you." He looked Nix in the eye and tried to convey that he actually believed that, though he wasn't sure he did, along with everything Dick had ever felt about Nix, and how damn guilty he felt for even considering what he'd been about to do.

Maybe some of it got across, because Nix's mouth curled up into a small smile. Then he pulled away, and and stepped back to a more decorous distance in case the men saw. "Sure, Dick," he said. "I guess it's when."

Dick nodded slightly, his throat too tight to be able to speak.

"Figure I'll go find a new helmet and see if I can find the 501st today," Nix said when Dick hadn't managed to get anything out after a couple of minutes.

"Good," Dick said. "Don't go towards Third, I just came from there." Now that his moment has passed, Dick didn't want to know if Lewis would be able to offer Nix something he couldn't turn down. Better if they both stayed away, when the temptation offered Dick had nearly proved too much.

Nix nodded. "Back soon," he said, and vanished into the night.

_Away with us he’s going,_  
_The solemn-eyed:_  
_He’ll hear no more the lowing_  
_Of the calves on the warm hillside_  
_Or the kettle on the hob_  
_Sing peace into his breast,_  
_Or see the brown mice bob_  
_Round and round the oatmeal chest._

The next morning, the weather broke, the skies clearing for the first time in a week, and the Air Corps and the RAF were able to drop supplies into Bastogne. Suddenly, the men had food and ammunition and hope again. They had a pale blue sky lifting their spirits.

The Luftwaffe responded by strafing the lines.

That evening, Dick and Nix walked from the edge of the 501st all the way over to Third Battalion, stopping at every foxhole along the way. Dick had had six hundred souls under his care when they'd arrived at Bastogne, but supplies or not, he was losing men by the hour.

The German's had pushed forward up the hill that afternoon, trying to force a break between Second and Third Battalions, and half the OPs weren't where they'd been the night before. The captain of Fox Company was still trying to re-establish his lines and do a headcount when Dick got there.

"Could be worse. Five dead, seventeen wounded, one missing," he told Dick. "I think. I'll send a runner when we have a better idea of the situation. We're holding for now anyway. I think they've given up for the night." Then he actually knocked on the bark of an adjacent tree trunk.

"Carry on," Dick said, suppressing the temptation to do the same. Out of habit as much as anything, his feet took him to that last F Company position. The foxhole was still there, but only the replacement sat in it, hugging his rifle and rocking back and forth. Dick could only assume the Toccoa-trained corporal who'd been there the past three nights was somewhere on Fox's casualty lists.

Nix faded back while Dick knelt at the rim of the foxhole, trying to remember the boy's name. He;d been trying to learn Dog and Fox's men the way he knew Easy's, but it was difficult with so much turn over. "How are you doing, Private?" he asked.

"Holding the line, sir," the kid said, though Dick thought he'd have trouble holding against a feather, let alone a German assault.

"You're doing a good job, son," Dick told him. The kid had stopped rocking, and was looking at him now, so Dick asked where he was from, which turned out to be a town in Illinois Dick had never heard of, and that the kid missed his brothers but hoped the war ended before they were old enough to enlist. Nix was staying silent in the background, but Dick knew they were both thinking that it was a miracle this private was old enough to have gone through training. As he talked, the private gradually relaxed and seemed to come back into himself, eventually showing Dick a picture of two curly-haired, sloe-eyed boys that could have been his twins except for their heights. "You're holding on for them," Dick told him, almost believing it. "So this war is over soon."

The kid nodded earnestly, looking up at Dick like he was Eisenhower, or possibly Jesus. "Sir," he said, voice full of hope, "do they know what happened to Jimmy, I mean Corporal Fitzpatrick, sir?"

"You better ask your sergeant, son," Dick told him.

"Serge keeps saying the krauts musta got him," the private said, "but, sir, he went missing before they attacked. Said he need to take a...a piss, sir, and never came back."

Dick felt the hairs on the back of his neck lift, but he made his face mild and his tone level as he asked, "Which what did Fitzpatrick go, Private?"

The private pointed west towards Third Battalion, but a little back from the line. "It was a couple hours ago, sir," he said pathetically. "Jimmy promised he'd be back before he missed anything."

Dick reached down and patted the boy's shoulder. "You just hang tough here, trooper. Captain Nixon and I will go look for Corporal Fitzpatrick."

"Think we'll find him?" Nix asked as he followed Dick into the snow. There was a clear set of tracks there, more recent than Dick's from the night before. "Seems like a long shot."

"I'm almost certain we won't," Dick answered, but didn't say anything else until Nix made an inquiring grunt. "It's worth looking, don't you think?" he asked instead.

Nix shook his head slightly, indicating an unwillingness to go beyond humouring his best friend.

A few hundred yards into the woods the came to the edge of a bomb crater, black earth spread across new snow, trees blasted to splinters across the whole mess. Dick looked it over his mind struggling to find recognisable shapes in the chaos. There, surely, was one of the twisted green-leafed trees of the circle, which meant the splinters were from at least one of the others. Dick strode forward, hardly hesitating as he made his way over broken ground. There, in a miraculously untouched patch of snow, were the circle of tracks he'd made turning three times each in three visits. Another, smaller set of bootprints overlaid his own. A single set, not returning.

"I guess we know what happened to Corporal Fitzpatrick," Nix said from behind Dick's shoulder. He was looking at the crater, which was deep enough to have annihilated any trace of a body.

"I guess we do," Dick agreed. What had the creature called Lewis looked like to Fitzpatrick, Dick wondered, and what had he offered? What would this land look like in seven years with, please God, the war long over?

Dick looked at the snow in front of him, then at Nix, who Dick had come so close to leading to this very place the night before, before it was too late. If he had, Dick and Strayer would be looking at this same crater right now, and Dick would be letting his C.O. make all the wrong conclusions, not his friend. He didn't yet know what, if anything, he would tell Nix when they had time to talk, or if they'd survive long enough to have that talk, but Dick was grateful he hadn't sold his chance away. He could only pray that Fitzpatrick never regretted his own choice.

Not knowing what else to say, Dick turned away from the ruins of the fairy ring, and followed Nix out of the woods.

_For he comes, the human child,_  
_To the waters and the wild_  
_With a faery, hand in hand,_  
_For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand._


End file.
